Admitting to Self-Delusion is Important: Three Questions for Meghan Harrison

Meghan Harrison is the author of the new chapbook Amateur Hours from Rahila’s Ghost Press. Don’t miss the official launch on Thursday, July 26 at The Ossington (61 Ossington Ave., Toronto) at 7:30 p.m. 

E Martin Nolan: You work in sports journalism, and you’re a poet. I’ve long wondered why it is so rare to read a good sports poem. I wouldn’t say any of the poems in Amateur Hours are strictly sports poems, but sports are often invoked. For instance, in the first poem, “Variance Machine,” you write:

Today I can’t / stop picking at my sores, / which are thick and literal, / the body ivied with defensive / interferences.

Sports, here, serve as a metaphorical space. The body’s healing is implicitly compared to (illegal) defensive actions in sports (“interference” being a penalty in some sports). The sports comparison is complex. It seems to deflate the seriousness of bodily scars by aligning it with the comparative frivolousness of sports. It also renders those scars more starkly, because the rules of the body and healing are less cut-and-dry than the rules of sports. Then again, interference is a rule notoriously dependent on the subjective judgement of a referee. What effect would you say sports have on our, and your, sense of certainty? Do we turn there for certainty, or do sports, as described above, just make the general uncertainty we live with a bit more weird and complex, and maybe also more understandable?

Meghan Harrison: The physical symptoms described in “Variance Machine” are from an autoimmune disease. Here, that becomes a penalty the body serves due to an error in judgement about enforcing its own rules. (That poem's also a bit haunted by Steve Bartman, the Cubs fan who was pilloried for interfering with a potential catch at Wrigley Field in the 2003 NLCS. The ivy that covers Wrigley's outfield wall can “interfere” with the ball as well.)I think sports give us an opportunity to safely, voluntarily, and sometimes even joyfully experience uncertainty—which is not how we usually encounter it in the rest of our lives. In sports, the effect of uncertainty on real people is even considered a source of entertainment. The way that fans and media build narrative from highly random events is an extreme version of the way we create personal stories about things that are significantly or totally out of our control. Of course, not all fans are interested in narratives. People readily acknowledge the intellectual (and, for teams, financial) appeal of using statistics to distinguish the role of luck from the role of skill in determining and predicting outcomes. I’d argue that stats have emotional and psychological appeal, too—we want to be able to tell the difference between what happens to us because we “deserve it” and what happens because of chance. (The speaker in “Variance Machine” is preoccupied with luck partly because they’re sick; their suffering seems randomly generated.) The difficulty of making that distinction between fortune and merit in the comparatively controlled environment of a sport demonstrates that the general uncertainty we live with is well beyond our understanding. Instead, briefly limiting our awareness of that uncertainty to a playing surface helps us practice tolerating it—and gives us a socially acceptable avenue to express that we’re not very good at tolerating it.

Our ability to enjoy that art or take anything positive from it may require transforming it through the way we engage with the work.

EMN: Speaking of using models to learn to tolerate life, let’s jump from sports to movies. Your poem “High Fidelity (2000)” features a speaker attempting to understand her own circumstances through the eponymous movie. The movie itself fails, in its own world, to resolve the world’s contradictions. Instead, it “shrinks the Chicago skyline / into a diorama for his dramas.” And it fails to explain or solve the speaker’s own difficulties. Rob Gordon’s lists of albums are compared to “an index of potential losses,” and the speaker is left with “expectations so low / I can step right over them when I get off the subway.” This has me thinking about cross-genre dialogue. “Variance Machine” is dialoguing with sports as an art form. Here you’re dialoguing with film, as well as Sennah Yee (a poetic cinephile to whom the poem is dedicated). Near the end, the speaker accuses both herself and John Cusack of lying. This signals a positive sign of growth and understanding for the speaker. The painful things have not disappeared, but the speaker is no longer looking for John Cusack lying conveniently in a flower bed to save her. This brings me back to failure and its uses. Side note: I’m not entirely comfortable letting High Fidelity stand in for art, but in the poem it might. So, here’s what I’m wondering; is it ultimately a sign of growth to admit to lying? Because if art is going to fail to resolve our hurt, should we admit that its attempt to do so is at best a lie pretending to be true?

MH: In the spirit of failure, I’m going to argue a bit with your interpretation and then argue a bit with your question, but I’m glad you brought up Sennah Yee, who may have more successfully accomplished what I was trying to do. I think the failure you’ve noticed goes all the way to the roots of the piece, which is a pretty direct critique of the movie. Yee’s poems about films often seem to crystallize a moment when a scene or an aspect of the work clearly excludes a spectator from its intended audience, its sympathies, or its general imagination. In How Do I Look? that’s usually because the spectator isn’t white, isn’t male, or doesn’t successfully perform certain types of femininity. “High Fidelity (2000)” doesn’t isolate that moment the way Yee’s poems do. The speaker is slow to register the misogynist elements of the film and identifies with it for a long time. Revisiting the movie as a framework to understand the narrator’s own experiences reveals that it’s fundamentally broken and has been toxic—or has at least reinforced toxic influences from the dominant culture—in the past. It didn’t, and won’t, illuminate her life because it has trouble accommodating women as people, never mind imagining a woman like John Cusack’s character in the hero’s role. (The book is aging much better than the screen adaptation, largely because Nick Hornby’s version of Rob is more pathetic and less sympathetic.) I’m not convinced admitting to lying is always a sign of growth—it certainly pales in comparison to not lying. I do, however, believe that admitting to self-delusion is an important step forward. The movie/novel and the poem both involve protagonists who shed some of those delusions, but the movie isn’t very concerned about the women who are hurt in order to guide Rob Gordon to enlightenment. The poem, on the other hand, is almost exclusively concerned with a woman’s pain.

Those qualities make it an interesting and unexpected vehicle for undercutting authority, delivering jokes, or trying to create intimacy with the reader ...

Is art always lying about its capacity to resolve our hurt? I’m not sure; that depends a lot on your expectations about what resolution entails (it seems distinct from, and lesser than, healing), what the hurt is, and who’s being addressed. I think it is fair to say that art that actively marginalizes some of the people in its potential audience won’t resolve the hurt of those people. Our ability to enjoy that art or take anything positive from it may require transforming it through the way we engage with the work.

EMN: It’s not lying, but self-delusion that’s at stake here. Fair enough. I missed the indicators of the specific (misogynistic) ways in which High Fidelity fails as a piece of art. Perhaps I should have further pursued my hesitation in assuming a ’90s John Cusack movie could stand in for art. And I agree, now that you say it, that art does have capacity to help us heal, though it can, of course, fail like High Fidelity does. It’s interesting how looking at “High Fidelity (2000)” as the failure of a specific piece of art, as opposed to Art, makes it both sadder and more redeeming. There’s this piece of art that someone made that actively excludes people, causing damage. And yet, it’s just that piece of art that does that. Art retains the ability to heal—and that’s exactly what the poem does. It gets past the self-delusions of the movie and moves on to a better place. Finally, “You Don’t Have To Go Home But You Can’t Stay Here” is written in caps lock. Caps lock signals a specific kind of language use today. How is writing a poem in all caps different? Does having caps lock on change the way you think about language? I also have in mind that you work in sports journalism, so you have likely had to read a lot of stupid sports fans comments that make use of caps lock.

MH: I think being Mad Online has moved beyond the all-caps comment or even the all-caps tweet, whether because people are finding more nuance in their other language and punctuation choices or because they’ve ceded caps lock as a key signature to the “~*I MADE $5,000 WORKING FROM HOME” spambots. At this point, I associate caps lock mainly with two things: Jenny Holzer’s text art, and the earlier years of Film Crit Hulk. The style lends authority and emphasis, and it rejects intimacy partly as a result. I think it’s also visually and emotionally stark. Those qualities make it an interesting and unexpected vehicle for undercutting authority, delivering jokes, or trying to create intimacy with the reader, all things that “You Don’t Have To Go Home But You Can’t Stay Here” eventually does. Personally, I’m most likely to use caps lock to communicate enthusiasm or intensity when I’m messaging my friends. Annoyed by the circularity of my problems, I texted someone “HETEROSEXUALITY IS BORING,” and immediately thought it looked like something from Holzer’s “Truisms.” (Go through your texts and I bet you’ll eventually find an accidental all-caps Holzerism, too!) I decided to write a whole poem in that style, and an altered version of that text message is the first line. Of course, all-caps texts become more difficult to read the longer they get (even Film Crit Hulk eventually switched to lowercase). I considered visually formatting the poem like “Truisms,” without white space between the statements, but it was too punishing. Writing an entire poem in caps lock made me more aware of the demands I was making on a reader’s attention and encouraged me to make the statements as brief as possible. It’s also difficult to spend a lot of time equivocating because it looks ridiculous. Converting your whole piece to capital letters would probably be a useful editing exercise. To bring this interview full circle, the Dallas Cowboys commissioned an installation from Holzer in 2012, displaying some of her texts on the Cowboys Stadium video board, and put some of them on merchandise. You could buy an authentic team shirt that said, “EXPIRING FOR LOVE IS BEAUTIFUL BUT STUPID.” Shockingly, the Cowboys did not try to merchandise “MEN DON’T PROTECT YOU ANYMORE.”